WebMage (14 page)

If I went to my grandmother and let her know what was happening, I'd have a whole pile of hard questions to answer, most of which would lead straight back to Atropos. And, with the curse hovering over me, I couldn't go there. Saving the Fate Core would almost certainly get the traditional death sentence commuted, but imprisonment at Saint Turing's would be the least of my punishments.

I had no desire to emulate Prometheus. The myths may claim that was all Zeus's show, but he'd never have been able to chain a Titan without the complicity of the Fates. My eternal imprisonment would leave the field open for Atropos to destroy free will, not to mention making it hard to see Cerice. In addition, discovering my little trip to the Core would likely cause Clotho to add me to her active enemies list. One angry Fate I might dodge, two would pretty much doom me. That left only one option. I'd have to kill the dragon myself and hope nobody noticed.

"Melchior, load Vaccine for speed dump. Execute." His eyes went dreamy and far away as he began the transfer.

"Boss," he mumbled, fighting to speak despite the processor load, "hitting that thing with Vaccine would be like shooting BBs at the hydra."

"I know that. Just load it."

A small beep escaped his lips. "Loaded."

"Good, dump it into this machine." I patted the console. Melchior plugged in and complied. "Next. Melchior, load and dump E-bola."

"But that's not finished, and—"

"Melchior, previous command. Execute."

"Executing."

"Thank you, Mel." I straightened my spine. "Now I'm going to do something extremely stupid and dangerous."

"Since when is that newsworthy enough to announce?"

"Your confidence is underwhelming. I'm going to do several things in very quick order and I'll need you to multitask. I want you to prep Exit Strategy for instant use. I also want you to load the whole Snow Daze menu into active memory. I'm not certain if we'll need that later, but if we do, we'll need it fast. Can you hold all of that ready to execute without crashing?"

"Could be rough," said Mel. "Snow Daze is a big menu. Whiteout alone is a pretty heavy-duty spell. When you add Black Ice, North Wind, and all the others… Hmm."

He stared off into space for a while before finally nodding. I let out a long breath. If I'd had to give the appropriate commands in the correct sequence with the right syntax to make all of that work when the time came…

"All right. Melchior, prep Exit Strategy-Snow Daze sequence. Execute."

He folded himself into a full lotus, closed his eyes, and began to hum quietly. I crossed my fingers and waited. Nothing. If he crashed, he did it very quietly. My turn. First I took my borrowed machine out of the security net. The kind of programming I was about to do tended to ring all sorts of bells, and I
really
didn't want to see the system administrator. I pulled Vaccine up on the screen alongside E-bola and went to work. It was touchy stuff. Vaccine was a pretty straightforward antivirus program, and it would make a good delivery system. E-bola was an entirely different story.

Every coder worth his RAM has written a virus or two, usually fairly benign little things. Most hard-core hackers have also at least conceived of, and probably coded, a little bit of their very own doomsday virus. Something designed to eat applications for breakfast, operating systems for lunch, and the hardware for dinner.

E-bola is mine. It makes Scorched Earth, which took down the whole mweb, look like a freshman's intro-programming project. It's also a very rough beta version, and too large to compile on anything short of a mainframe. Its biggest drawback so far is burn cycle. Like its namesake, it tends to kill its host too quickly for really effective transmission. I didn't see that as a problem in this case.

It took time I didn't really have to gut Vaccine and insert E-bola into the raw hole I created for it, and I had to cut a lot of corners on the way. I fed this new hybrid into the compiler, titled the job Saint George, and set it running. That was going to take something like another ten minutes.

I drew my sword. I was running an unauthorized compile on an Atropos.web computer. If I'd made any mistakes when I pulled out of the security net, alarms would be going off all over the place, and someone would undoubtedly be along to kill me shortly.

Five minutes passed without the world falling on me, and I was beginning to think I might get away with it. Then the door at the far end of the room slid open and my cousin Laric stepped in. He wore black breeches, boots, and a full shirt of white silk. The ensemble matched his beard and skin nicely, giving him a piratical air. More importantly, he was alone. I let out a little sigh of relief. Laric was one of the more civilized of Atropos's brood, and I had an excellent chance of reasoning with him. We'd even been friends once upon a time.

"Ah, Ravirn, how nice to see you again," said Laric. "We so rarely get a chance to exchange pleasantries." He drew his own rapier and dagger. "I must admit I'm surprised to see you under such circumstances. This"—he gestured at the machine that was running my job with his dagger—"seems a bit clumsy. You haven't the sense of a drunken raccoon, but you're normally more subtle." He slowly advanced until, with his last words, he was close enough to aim a cut at my left shoulder.

"Wait!" I yelped, leaping back. "Dragon! Fate Core! Big Dragon! Eris!" I probably could have been a bit more articulate, but I was a little on the tense side.

Laric shook his head sadly and struck again. This time I parried with my dagger and reflexively used my rapier to riposte toward his right thigh. After that I was too busy too speak. Laric knocked my first thrust aside with his sword and swept his dagger in a backhanded cut at my face. I leaned out of reach and aimed a stop thrust at his midriff. We'd exchanged another couple of dozen quick passes when the loud ringing of a bell behind me took my mind off Laric for a critical moment. He must have been startled as well. Otherwise his thrust would have skewered me instead of glancing off a rib and opening a long bloody cut in my side.

"Hold, enough!" I cried, leaping back. "I need to tell someone about this, because it's more important than my neck." He looked skeptical, but didn't press his advantage. I continued, "You can go back to trying to kill me in a minute if you don't like what you hear. Eris has hacked the Fate Core."

"What!? How did you find out?"

It was not a good time for the truth. I needed something that would convince Laric to listen to me, and with the curse hovering in the air waiting to twist my words the truth was not it. At the moment a well-told lie would be infinitely more convincing.

"I had this idea about how to hack into your server here." I outlined my ley-line ploy before continuing. I didn't tell him about my motivations, of course. "I was still investigating whether it would work and sniffing around the ley nexus when I found evidence that someone had preceded me. Knowing the amount of credibility I have with your grandmother, I thought I'd better have rock-solid proof before I took anything to the Fates. So I followed the line here and found a huge dragon of a virus wallowing around in the Fate Core."

"A dragon. In the Fate Core. Right."

"No, dammit. I have hard evidence."

"Show me."

It was a risk but… I sheathed my weapons and turned back to my console. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Laric bring his rapier up to hover beside my neck. It hung there for a long beat before he finally slid it back into its scabbard. Wishing Melchior were free to do the job, I roughly bandaged the cut in my side. Then I showed Laric what I'd found and what I was doing about it.

"I don't know about this," he said, tapping the screen where Saint George was laid out. "It has too much potential for going wild and taking out the whole Core. I think I should get Atropos down here."

"If you do, she'll kill me." I hesitated for a moment after I said that, waiting to see if I felt the pull of the curse. But apparently that was far enough from the matter of Puppeteer and its ramifications to let me get away with it. "She may not do it today, but there's no question she will. I might be able to dodge her for a few months, but that contest is too unequal to go on forever." I gestured at the dragon. "I found that thing, and I'm trying to do something about it. Don't you think I deserve better than execution for my troubles?"

"Bastard!" he snarled, putting his face scant inches from mine. "You killed Moric, and now you expect
me
to save your ass?"

"I'm sorry about Moric, I really am, but that was self-defense." I wanted to move away, but I held my ground. "If you bring Atropos in now, it'll be murder." There was a long silence.

"I should have cut your throat before I had time to think about it," he growled. "All right, we'll try it your way, but with conditions. First, you have to swear on your blood that you'll never ever tell anyone I let you off the hook."

"Fair enough." I placed my right hand over my heart. "I swear on my blood and my honor that it shall be as you say."

"Good. Now, here's the hard one. We aren't going to just let this Saint George program of yours loose. We'll ride it all the way in, and shut it down when it's finished." He glared at me fiercely, as if daring me to turn him down.

It was a nasty condition. It's a moderately painful procedure, and under the circumstances, it could easily have fatal consequences. In order to enter the magic-laced world of the mweb, you have to send your animating will, your anima, into the ether. If the program you're inhabiting dies, it takes your anima with it, and you die, too. And quite frankly, Saint George looked pretty flimsy next to that huge thing Eris had coded. But Laric was right, letting the E-bola side of Saint George into the Core without someone aboard who could pull the plug was an unconscionable risk.

Laric must have been hoping I'd turn him down, because he looked disappointed at my nod. Disappointed and more than a bit scared. I couldn't blame him. I was scared, too. But we were both committed. He leaned over, opened a panel on my machine, and pulled out a couple of networking cables. He handed one to me, then reached into his pouch and pulled out a tiny iron dagger. I looked at the athame with distaste, but that didn't prevent me producing a matching one. I plugged my cable into a socket in the pommel.

"I'm ready when you are," I said.

"After you."

I drew a deep breath and stabbed the athame into my left palm, bearing down until the simple cross hilt touched flesh. The pain was breathtaking, but fleeting, as my awareness was catapulted into the computer. I slid easily into Saint George. Laric joined me a moment later. Looking around, it quickly became obvious my hybrid had problems. The integration between the two parent programs was spotty, with E-bola banging around loosely inside Vaccine's shell. We were going to have to operate it almost as two separate programs.

"Do you have a preference?" I asked Laric.

"I'll take the Vaccine side. It seems pretty straightforward, and that E-bola thing looks gods-awful."

"All right then. Lay on, Macduff."

He grinned at me and aimed us for the Core. We slid through the twists and turns of the ley line like a guided missile, accelerating all the way. If I'd known what kind of driver Laric was, I'd have insisted he take E-bola. There was a moment of blackness as we crashed through the gateway, then we were arrowing across the sea straight toward the dragon.

We glanced off its back with enough force to rip great chunks of our code loose and send them tumbling into the waves. Vaccine was the best antivirus I've ever written. It was quick, sharp, and very nasty. But we hit the dragon's armor a half dozen times with no apparent effect before the beast finally noticed us. On our next attempt, it reared up with impossible speed, flaring its hood and preparing to strike. Laric put us into a steep climb and headed right for the open mouth.

"What are you doing!?" I screamed.

"Aiming for a soft spot!" He pointed at the monster's exposed palate.

We almost made it. The dragon was a beautiful piece of programming, but it was still just ones and zeros, incapable of anticipating the sorts of completely irrational actions people are prone to make. Still, all it needed to do was close its mouth. Huge teeth ripped through the outer program, tearing it and Laric to ribbons, but doing only minor damage to E-bola. The same lack of integration that had forced us to split control of Saint George let me tear myself free of Vaccine's corpse and slide down the dragon's gullet.

That put me into the thing's digestive track. It was dark, it stank, and I could feel E-bola starting to come apart around me. Big pieces tore free and scattered. My awareness split and followed them. As each string of code peeled off into the darkness, I went with it and we latched on to a different part of the dragon's command line. Then we started to feed. It didn't take long after that. I could feel the dragon's strength flowing into us as we became a thousand ulcers inside the dragon's stomach, each one boring itself a route to the surface. Inside of three minutes, the dragon was bleeding out through a hide that looked like scarlet lace.

Power cascaded through my soul and with it ecstasy. My many parts all wanted to feed, and we were surrounded by a feast of data. I don't know what might have happened then if one of my awarenesses hadn't bitten into a fragment of Vaccine. The electronic taste of Lane's cooling blood filled my mouth, and I gagged. I called out to the burrowing code strings, sending them the shutdown order.

The sound of an alarm filled the air. I opened my eyes and found myself back in my own body. I was kneeling over Laric's corpse. The feedback had killed him. His hand, where the athame had been, was a charred wreck, and scorch marks ran up his arm, but his face was almost peaceful. Reaching into my pouch, I pulled out a couple of coins and laid them on his closed eyelids. I slid another into his mouth as fee for the ferryman.

"Sleep easy, Laric. You died well."

Wincing, I pulled the athame from my palm and replaced it in my pouch. I was just whistling the spell that closed the magically charged wound when a harsh noise drew my attention to the room's door. Hwyl stood there, growling low in his throat.